Ovid

Biography

Ovid, whose full name was Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet, the last of the great poets of the age of Augustus. He was born in 43 BC in Sulmo, in the mountains east of Rome, into an old family of knights, and his father sent him to Rome to study rhetoric so that he would make a career in law and public office. He held a few minor posts but gave them up for poetry, and his witty love poems, the Amores, the Heroides, letters from heroines of myth to the men who had left them, and his mock textbook of seduction, The Art of Love, made him the most fashionable poet in Rome.

His greatest work, the Metamorphoses, tells some two hundred and fifty myths of transformation in fifteen books, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. In AD 8 Augustus suddenly banished him to Tomis, on the Black Sea in today’s Romania, for what Ovid called a poem and a mistake; the poem was The Art of Love, and the mistake has never been explained. In exile he wrote the mournful Tristia and Letters from Pontus, begging in vain to be allowed home, and he died in Tomis around AD 17. The Metamorphoses became one of the most influential books in European literature and art, a source for Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and countless painters.